In my house we have 10 computers. 9 of them are clustered together to render Blender3d scenes and animations and the tenth one is used to keep the bathroom door shut (it's a Mac, and it belongs as close to the crapper as possible).
Do you need a bandaid? It looks like your heart is bleeding...
Yikes, you certainly are an active agent of pro-Nazi propaganda. Jews were required to leave so it was OK to kill them?
GP never said anything of the sort. All GP did was point out that Germany would have had a hard time slaughtering German Jews since they were all forced to leave in 1935. So when the Holocaust started (supposedly 1943), Germany had to get their Jews from elsewhere. The next logical step (if you're capable of logic) is that Germany got their slaughtered Jews from occupied lands, such as Romania, Poland, etc. (France, even)
Making logical and objective observations does not constitute Pro-Nazi propaganda. Interpreting logical and objective observations as Pro-Nazi propaganda means you're fucking heart is bleeding, and you should go see a doctor.
Their navy was inferior to what the US had, so they devised subs.
Subs? As in submarines? You know, those things that have been built since the late (really late) 19th Century? I realize I'm nit-picking, but subs were already a done deal for WWII. In fact, it was a German sub sinking the Lusitania that brought the US into WWI.;) (They were called U-boats then, as in Underwater Boats)
The "taskbar" contained both opened and closed windows. All systems I have seen before then only showed closed windows, opened windows were either not represented or where in a different navigator.
Didn't Commodore's 2.0 version of Amiga Workbench support this? I recall it working as you describe...
The "taskbar" was the first indication that somebody has realized that text is important. They shrunk down the "icon" as small as possible (probably somebody at Microsoft tried to get rid of them, but was stopped by the "experts" who think easy-to-use == pictures). And they made the text in the taskbar icon prominent.
I don't see how this is invention. It's just a graphical design choice. Also a choice made by Commodore, where icons weren't always huge (unless you ran 3rd party software that made huge icons, which you could) and were always accompanied by text. The icon was supposed to be for quick usage, i.e. you could recognize a picture faster than you can read, but was never intended to stand on its own without text.
They got rid of the divider line between the window borders and the contents and made thw windows look a lot more like unified objects. (for some reason they have reverted to old-fashioned graphics today, unfortunatly the good graphic desiginers they had on Windows95 have apparently been replaced by Enlightenment geeks with no clean graphic sense whatsoever).
Aesthetic enhancements != invention
They supported drag-resize of windows, and hacked their system so it was fast enough to draw this on existing machines, rather than punting like far faster Unix machines were doing.
Quite the contrary, you needed a pretty fast 486 to do this. 33mhz at least, iirc, may have required Pentiums (although I knew people that ran win95 on 486s). On the other hand, Commodore Amiga also supported drag-resize of windows, and there was third-party software that would make it redraw the contents while resizing (I recall Macs at the time doing it too, and this was 1988), and they could do it on 7 mhz 68000 machines.
I belive Microsoft is responsible for a lot of the linking of "program to run" to the file itself. Every system I have ever seen before that required an explicit indicator as to the program to run. Apple's files contained this indication (the creator id) and is thus not exactly what Microsoft did. Now this could be done a whole lot better, such as using a program like Unix "file" to figure it out, and there is ZERO support at an os level (why isn't there a system call to exec a file?), but before Windows this idea did not exist.
Um, there is a system call to exec a file, assuming you're talking about executing a file. All Microsoft did was attach extensions to filenames. UNIX has always had MIME types, as far as I know, that define what content is in the file. More recently MIME types include extensions as part of the definition, but not always. There're headers in files that tell you what kind of content it is.
As far as opening a data file and it automatically opening the application that created it (or at least *an* application the user has installed that can open that type of file), um, again Commodore Amiga had this in, what, 1986? Yeah, that sounds about right.;)
Commodore's Amiga was a very innovative machine, but even then the OS just ripped a number of things from previous existing work, because the OS was just thrown together to get the box out the door and into people's houses. I'm not claiming that Commodore or the Amiga folks innovated these things we're discussing, I'm only pointing out where it was already being used before Microsoft "innovated" it.;)
if I click on a window that belongs to the Gimp, only that one window is made active. The Gimp is an app, and an app usually consists of a collection of windows, palettes, etc - when I activate an app, ALL of the associated windows should be brought forward, not just the one.
Right-click the GIMP windows (you are running a KDE that groups all windows from one app together, right?) select "MOve all to Desktop->pick an empty desktop". Now when you want to bring the GIMP to the front, click on the desktop on which it sits.
I tend to have the GIMP on 2, Blender on 1, and Mozilla, a terminal, and a few odds and ends on 3, while I'm doing graphical work. And I go ahead and let KDE put all applications on all desktops in the process bar so I don't have to remember which desktop each app is on, I can just click on *any* GIMP window and KDE'll automatically take me to the whole GIMP.
The only purchasing decisions I need to rethink are what sodas to stock in my portable restaurant. I stock Pepsi and Diet Pepsi, and it looks like those are on the list. *everything* else I purchase is not on the list (except for the Texaco down the street, wait a minute, they got bought by Shell;) ). Since Coke isn't on the list, I can put in Coke and Diet Coke. But there's an additional problem with soda, I think. Who's the distributor? I suppose that the Coke distributor doesn't distribute pepsi and vice-versa, so I should still be safe, right?
One more thing about the list. I saw Wal-mart listed, but what about Sam's Club? Is Sam's Club now separate from Wal-mart corporation?
Oh yeah. Since I apparently don't shop that list, and it's been a long-standing condition unrelated to politics, does that make me some sort of anti-consumer?;) (So yeah, I don't mind eliminating the couple of things I *do* buy that are on that list, since it's such a small step for me, and one giant leap for mankind, or something like that)
Jesus fucking christ! Why are there so many people posting that printing a receipt from a voting machine somehow provides proof on how an individual voted? Why can't the voting machine just punch a regular ol' card and give it to you? Why can't it just print out a register-style receipt and give it to you, without any name/number/individual identifier on it? So you vote for Kerry and the machine prints out a receipt that says "Kerry-D" and you go dump it in the box. At the end of the day, we get a nice report from the software that says "Looks like Kerry won, waiting for confirmation." So we all *know* Kerry won, but we're waiting for all the human counters counting up all the receipts that say "Kerry-D" "Bush-R" or "Nader-I" or whatever. In the meantime, we get our immediate satisfaction.
After confirmation, we can now archive *electronically* the voting record, which, if you recall doesn't include any personal identifiers. We also stick the other votes in whatever archival format. Ideally there'd be another count and a record-by-record count of the database to ensure the electronic record is identical to the paper record, any differences are noted, and the whole thing is cryptographically signed and proliferated to various mirrors and put up for download by the general public. So now we can all run our own reports on it.
What's so hard about that? It's about as cut and dried as it gets. We get all the benefits of having electronic voting, and we get all the error checking of our current voting system, and we lose *nothing* in the process (except a few bucks implementing the thing). But we gain in speed of reporting (but wait the same amount of time for confirmation, which we would have waited anyway), we gain the ability to archive every single election that ever happens, and we gain the ability to push those archives out to the rest of us for review. Democracy gets better! Hurray computers!
no one is willing to switch their house over to solar energy
Where the fuck do you live? I live in the Seattle area, and in the wintertime we get all of 6 hours of daylight, most of it cloudy. Granted, solar panels still work when it's cloudy, but I understand not as efficiently (i.e. they don't generate as much as they would on a sunny day).
So show me your solar panel contraption that'll keep my house powered in the wintertime and finance the loan and I'll buy it. (Can't promise to buy it if nobody will finance the loan because I'm broke, but possibly with rebates from the power company I can make the loan affordable)
Solar power is a dead-end in northern climates unless you pipe it in from southern climates. Even then, there's a neighborhood in La Luz, NM that I used to live in where there are literally rows of houses each with solar panels on their rooftops.
I suspect you're just crying about how wonderful solar power is without completely examining the whole problem. Even if you provide workable solar power to every single home in the world, you still haven't gotten rid of fossil fuels. We have planes, trains, and automobiles that all require fossil fuels. Military use as well. How about rocketry? Do any of our rockets require fossil fuels? (I think "no" but I could be wrong) And nobody's going to buy a car that they have to spend eight hours recharging in order to drive another 100 miles.
The problem, as usual, is more serious and much more complicated. We don't just need to replace power plants. We need a completely new source of energy, period. While power plants are the top energy producer, they're not the only one. I'm all for working on one problem at a time, but there's enough of us out there that we can solve them all at once.;) The main problem is getting the technology out there. We already have reliable wind power, water, and yes, even solar power. We already understand the dynamics of each method, and there're even more projects looking at other ways (combine wind + water, stick a wind turbine in the middle of ocean currents!). What we don't have is the requisite mass adoption.
I call troll on this whole article. Given the time it would take to power up with nukes, could we accomplish the same power up with renewable sources? I suspect the problems are mostly political at this point, but how much would it actually cost (total cycle costs for 50 years, that is, plus additional costs for decommissioning nuke plants) and how long would it actually take? Let's see a real comparison here, renewable sources that don't produce CO2 vs nuke plants. I'm all over nuke power, don't get me wrong, but I just don't see how it's going to be any more effective to setup a bunch of nuke plants at $XXX trillion dollars compares to setting up a bunch of "green" plants at $YYY trillion dollars.
Throw the wallet on the ground. When he goes to pick it up, you kick him in the forehead. He'll be stunned and knocked on his ass.
I've got two particular approaches in mind.:)
The Dan Akroyd approach: *take out wallet and drop it* "I'm sorry, let me get that for you" *bend over and hit your head on the mugger's head, who is also bending over for it* "Ouch! I'm sorry, I didn't see you" *bend over again and trip over the air or something, knocking into the mugger* "Oops, I didn't see you there" etc.
How will you lose any of your own self respect if you hand over your possessions to avoid being injured?
Because that means you're a coward. It means you can't stand up for yourself and protect what's yours, be it property or freedom.
Furthermore, there's sort of a feedback effect going on. People are told to do as muggers say, so people do it. So people get mugged. So more people say "Do as the mugger tells you so you don't get hurt", and even more people get mugged. I'm sorry, but this "Be an easy target" rule is self-defeating. If you want to stop crime, or at least reduce it, then as a victim you have to fight back. If you just sit there and allow yourself to be victimized, you are not only responsible for being a pussy yourself, but for providing incentive for the criminal to go and victimize yourself, thus making you at least partially responsible for the next crime the bastard commits.
Of course, if you want all of that hanging on your conscience because you're too chickenshit to stand up for yourself, why don't you take a walk down my street? You probably have some stuff that would come in pretty handy for me....
OH yeah. Of course cops will tell you to be a pussy. If everybody stopped putting up with criminals, cops would be out of the job. Advising people to just lay down and take it is called "job security", for both the cops and the muggers.
I'm sorry, but there is something wrong with corporate censorship. Corporations are huge government-like organizations whose sole purpose for existence is making money. There are many corporations that are multi-national, and many of those (and many others) are very powerful. Letting corporations censor stuff is just as dangerous to freedom as letting the government do it.
The way I understand it, Disney laid out terms and said "we'll ship any movie that meets these terms" and Fahrenheight 911 met those terms, and Disney decided not to distribute it. Well, that's a broken promise, and considering the size and power of Disney, I think it's pretty fucking important that they keep their word. Whether the story as I hear it is correct or not is actually irrelevant, since my point is that honor, integrity, and so forth are even more important to society when manifested in large multi-national corporations than they are when manifested in individuals.
Never forget feudalism. Give corporations the power to censor and feudalism is where we're going, except I think under the circumstances it would be called fascism or something or other. Same thing. Some lord who owns everything working us really fucking hard, abusing us, and so forth.
Now, you could have said "There's nothing unconstitutional about corporate censorship" and you would have been at least accurate. But some forms of corporate censorship are illegal (they fall under the heading of Full Disclosure laws, like those nice stickers you get on the canned/jarred food you buy that tell you what's in the can/jar) because our government already knows that corporate censorship is dangerous.
Although Civ is a very cool game and there are lots of planning and manegement skills one could learn from it, I wouln't reccomend it as a teaching tool, due to it's lack of connection to actual events in history. I don't think that games where students have the opportunity to write/re-write history are a good idea. I can easily imagine some high school age kids, raised on Civ saying "didn't the Babalonians build the Pyramids?"
I think you're failing to give students enough credit (although you're undoubtedly giving teachers too much).
Flip it around. Start your history class by playing Civ for the first month of the class. The whole class, together, (better make it FreeCiv with networking and crap) competitively against one another.
*Now* start teaching regular history. I'll bet you cover the curriculum in half the time, just by investing that month playing Civ, and you'll increase your students' average grades and seriously inflate (properly) their standardized test scores, because they will have *understanding* of how history happened.
Um, erm, let's see. As far as I can tell, Wolfenstein was based on the much older Castle Wolfenstein, which was originally produced by the nice German folks at Muse.
Um, yeah, cultural bias and all. Right. But which culture, exactly, is the bias coming from?
There's a self-defeating statment if I've ever seen one. Regardless, a quick search reveals that many mechanic services do indeed bill for diagnostics. Those who don't either pay their technicians less or charge you a higher hourly rate. The general reason why diagnositc fees are either all or nothing is because it is common to spend differing amounts of time diagnosing the same symptoms. Even a doctor will tell you that (who do, in fact, charge for s/office visits/diagnostic fees/).
Well, a former professional mechanic (me) says different. 99% of problems people have with cars can be diagnosed in 5 minutes or less, usually less. Building a relationship with a customer is worth spending those 5 minutes working for *free* to diagnose their car. I can't even think of how many stupid GM AC pressure sensors I sold just because they always looked the same on the gauges, and it literally took 2 seconds to hook up the gauges.
IN some specific areas, like exhaust and brakes, the free-looky is standard practice.
Besides the dealer (you know, the greediest little fuck on the block), most mechanics will only charge for diagnostics when they can't tell within 3-5 minutes what's wrong. That's the rule of thumb generally applied, actually. In the meantime, though, *every* mechanic shop posts something somewhere that says "We charge *this whole ton of money* for diagnostics", knowing that 99% of their diagnostics will be done for free.
Think about it. You're a customer, and you see a sign that says "Pay us $60 to tell us why your car is fucked up" and the mechanic just walks out and does it without billing you. Now how do you feel? How much does it increase the likelihood that you'll buy from these people who are obviously dedicated to serving the customer rather than bleeding him?
Would have been cheaper if you'd've sprung for the higher octane stuff. Most new(er) cars (as in, post 1975) are rated at 86 as the minimum. 85 just plain sucks. I used to drive a 91 Mazda 626 that got about 24 MPG on the highway. I put 84 octane in it in some po-dunk hick town in west Texas and only got 15 MPG on the tank. I was *pissed*.
Yep, you spent too much on your gas because you bought the wrong kind.;)
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In my house we have 10 computers. 9 of them are clustered together to render Blender3d scenes and animations and the tenth one is used to keep the bathroom door shut (it's a Mac, and it belongs as close to the crapper as possible).
Do you need a bandaid? It looks like your heart is bleeding...
Yikes, you certainly are an active agent of pro-Nazi propaganda. Jews were required to leave so it was OK to kill them?
GP never said anything of the sort. All GP did was point out that Germany would have had a hard time slaughtering German Jews since they were all forced to leave in 1935. So when the Holocaust started (supposedly 1943), Germany had to get their Jews from elsewhere. The next logical step (if you're capable of logic) is that Germany got their slaughtered Jews from occupied lands, such as Romania, Poland, etc. (France, even)
Making logical and objective observations does not constitute Pro-Nazi propaganda. Interpreting logical and objective observations as Pro-Nazi propaganda means you're fucking heart is bleeding, and you should go see a doctor.
Their navy was inferior to what the US had, so they devised subs.
Subs? As in submarines? You know, those things that have been built since the late (really late) 19th Century? I realize I'm nit-picking, but subs were already a done deal for WWII. In fact, it was a German sub sinking the Lusitania that brought the US into WWI. ;) (They were called U-boats then, as in Underwater Boats)
It was a third party add on that I saw starting in '92 sometime, but didn't really run well until WB 2.0. That's really all I remember about it.
We never get to see end-of-the-world omens here on the left coast!
That's because you're not on the right coast.
Howdy Doodly Doo! Anybody want some Toast?
I don't want your smegging toast!
That's because when Jerry's not around, it goes to me. See, it goes from God, to Jerry, to Me.
Um, to the cleaners?
Oh where do I start. ;)
The "taskbar" contained both opened and closed windows. All systems I have seen before then only showed closed windows, opened windows were either not represented or where in a different navigator.
Didn't Commodore's 2.0 version of Amiga Workbench support this? I recall it working as you describe...
The "taskbar" was the first indication that somebody has realized that text is important. They shrunk down the "icon" as small as possible (probably somebody at Microsoft tried to get rid of them, but was stopped by the "experts" who think easy-to-use == pictures). And they made the text in the taskbar icon prominent.
I don't see how this is invention. It's just a graphical design choice. Also a choice made by Commodore, where icons weren't always huge (unless you ran 3rd party software that made huge icons, which you could) and were always accompanied by text. The icon was supposed to be for quick usage, i.e. you could recognize a picture faster than you can read, but was never intended to stand on its own without text.
They got rid of the divider line between the window borders and the contents and made thw windows look a lot more like unified objects. (for some reason they have reverted to old-fashioned graphics today, unfortunatly the good graphic desiginers they had on Windows95 have apparently been replaced by Enlightenment geeks with no clean graphic sense whatsoever).
Aesthetic enhancements != invention
They supported drag-resize of windows, and hacked their system so it was fast enough to draw this on existing machines, rather than punting like far faster Unix machines were doing.
Quite the contrary, you needed a pretty fast 486 to do this. 33mhz at least, iirc, may have required Pentiums (although I knew people that ran win95 on 486s). On the other hand, Commodore Amiga also supported drag-resize of windows, and there was third-party software that would make it redraw the contents while resizing (I recall Macs at the time doing it too, and this was 1988), and they could do it on 7 mhz 68000 machines.
I belive Microsoft is responsible for a lot of the linking of "program to run" to the file itself. Every system I have ever seen before that required an explicit indicator as to the program to run. Apple's files contained this indication (the creator id) and is thus not exactly what Microsoft did. Now this could be done a whole lot better, such as using a program like Unix "file" to figure it out, and there is ZERO support at an os level (why isn't there a system call to exec a file?), but before Windows this idea did not exist.
Um, there is a system call to exec a file, assuming you're talking about executing a file. All Microsoft did was attach extensions to filenames. UNIX has always had MIME types, as far as I know, that define what content is in the file. More recently MIME types include extensions as part of the definition, but not always. There're headers in files that tell you what kind of content it is.
As far as opening a data file and it automatically opening the application that created it (or at least *an* application the user has installed that can open that type of file), um, again Commodore Amiga had this in, what, 1986? Yeah, that sounds about right. ;)
Commodore's Amiga was a very innovative machine, but even then the OS just ripped a number of things from previous existing work, because the OS was just thrown together to get the box out the door and into people's houses. I'm not claiming that Commodore or the Amiga folks innovated these things we're discussing, I'm only pointing out where it was already being used before Microsoft "innovated" it. ;)
if I click on a window that belongs to the Gimp, only that one window is made active. The Gimp is an app, and an app usually consists of a collection of windows, palettes, etc - when I activate an app, ALL of the associated windows should be brought forward, not just the one.
Right-click the GIMP windows (you are running a KDE that groups all windows from one app together, right?) select "MOve all to Desktop->pick an empty desktop". Now when you want to bring the GIMP to the front, click on the desktop on which it sits.
I tend to have the GIMP on 2, Blender on 1, and Mozilla, a terminal, and a few odds and ends on 3, while I'm doing graphical work. And I go ahead and let KDE put all applications on all desktops in the process bar so I don't have to remember which desktop each app is on, I can just click on *any* GIMP window and KDE'll automatically take me to the whole GIMP.
Heh, apparently the last time OpenBoot Troll posted, he posted in response to this.
I'm chuckling a bit, yes I am. ;)
IN response to your signature:
The only purchasing decisions I need to rethink are what sodas to stock in my portable restaurant. I stock Pepsi and Diet Pepsi, and it looks like those are on the list. *everything* else I purchase is not on the list (except for the Texaco down the street, wait a minute, they got bought by Shell ;) ). Since Coke isn't on the list, I can put in Coke and Diet Coke. But there's an additional problem with soda, I think. Who's the distributor? I suppose that the Coke distributor doesn't distribute pepsi and vice-versa, so I should still be safe, right?
One more thing about the list. I saw Wal-mart listed, but what about Sam's Club? Is Sam's Club now separate from Wal-mart corporation?
Oh yeah. Since I apparently don't shop that list, and it's been a long-standing condition unrelated to politics, does that make me some sort of anti-consumer? ;) (So yeah, I don't mind eliminating the couple of things I *do* buy that are on that list, since it's such a small step for me, and one giant leap for mankind, or something like that)
Jesus fucking christ! Why are there so many people posting that printing a receipt from a voting machine somehow provides proof on how an individual voted? Why can't the voting machine just punch a regular ol' card and give it to you? Why can't it just print out a register-style receipt and give it to you, without any name/number/individual identifier on it? So you vote for Kerry and the machine prints out a receipt that says "Kerry-D" and you go dump it in the box. At the end of the day, we get a nice report from the software that says "Looks like Kerry won, waiting for confirmation." So we all *know* Kerry won, but we're waiting for all the human counters counting up all the receipts that say "Kerry-D" "Bush-R" or "Nader-I" or whatever. In the meantime, we get our immediate satisfaction.
After confirmation, we can now archive *electronically* the voting record, which, if you recall doesn't include any personal identifiers. We also stick the other votes in whatever archival format. Ideally there'd be another count and a record-by-record count of the database to ensure the electronic record is identical to the paper record, any differences are noted, and the whole thing is cryptographically signed and proliferated to various mirrors and put up for download by the general public. So now we can all run our own reports on it.
What's so hard about that? It's about as cut and dried as it gets. We get all the benefits of having electronic voting, and we get all the error checking of our current voting system, and we lose *nothing* in the process (except a few bucks implementing the thing). But we gain in speed of reporting (but wait the same amount of time for confirmation, which we would have waited anyway), we gain the ability to archive every single election that ever happens, and we gain the ability to push those archives out to the rest of us for review. Democracy gets better! Hurray computers!
no one is willing to switch their house over to solar energy
Where the fuck do you live? I live in the Seattle area, and in the wintertime we get all of 6 hours of daylight, most of it cloudy. Granted, solar panels still work when it's cloudy, but I understand not as efficiently (i.e. they don't generate as much as they would on a sunny day).
So show me your solar panel contraption that'll keep my house powered in the wintertime and finance the loan and I'll buy it. (Can't promise to buy it if nobody will finance the loan because I'm broke, but possibly with rebates from the power company I can make the loan affordable)
Solar power is a dead-end in northern climates unless you pipe it in from southern climates. Even then, there's a neighborhood in La Luz, NM that I used to live in where there are literally rows of houses each with solar panels on their rooftops.
I suspect you're just crying about how wonderful solar power is without completely examining the whole problem. Even if you provide workable solar power to every single home in the world, you still haven't gotten rid of fossil fuels. We have planes, trains, and automobiles that all require fossil fuels. Military use as well. How about rocketry? Do any of our rockets require fossil fuels? (I think "no" but I could be wrong) And nobody's going to buy a car that they have to spend eight hours recharging in order to drive another 100 miles.
The problem, as usual, is more serious and much more complicated. We don't just need to replace power plants. We need a completely new source of energy, period. While power plants are the top energy producer, they're not the only one. I'm all for working on one problem at a time, but there's enough of us out there that we can solve them all at once. ;) The main problem is getting the technology out there. We already have reliable wind power, water, and yes, even solar power. We already understand the dynamics of each method, and there're even more projects looking at other ways (combine wind + water, stick a wind turbine in the middle of ocean currents!). What we don't have is the requisite mass adoption.
I call troll on this whole article. Given the time it would take to power up with nukes, could we accomplish the same power up with renewable sources? I suspect the problems are mostly political at this point, but how much would it actually cost (total cycle costs for 50 years, that is, plus additional costs for decommissioning nuke plants) and how long would it actually take? Let's see a real comparison here, renewable sources that don't produce CO2 vs nuke plants. I'm all over nuke power, don't get me wrong, but I just don't see how it's going to be any more effective to setup a bunch of nuke plants at $XXX trillion dollars compares to setting up a bunch of "green" plants at $YYY trillion dollars.
I'd rather be a coward than dead. My friends and family (probably) agree.
6 million Jews (and countless others) disagree with you. Bullies are not to be tolerated.
Throw the wallet on the ground. When he goes to pick it up, you kick him in the forehead. He'll be stunned and knocked on his ass.
I've got two particular approaches in mind. :)
The Dan Akroyd approach: *take out wallet and drop it* "I'm sorry, let me get that for you" *bend over and hit your head on the mugger's head, who is also bending over for it* "Ouch! I'm sorry, I didn't see you" *bend over again and trip over the air or something, knocking into the mugger* "Oops, I didn't see you there" etc.
The Crocodile Dundee approach, of course:
"That's not a knife. This is a knife."
How will you lose any of your own self respect if you hand over your possessions to avoid being injured?
Because that means you're a coward. It means you can't stand up for yourself and protect what's yours, be it property or freedom.
Furthermore, there's sort of a feedback effect going on. People are told to do as muggers say, so people do it. So people get mugged. So more people say "Do as the mugger tells you so you don't get hurt", and even more people get mugged. I'm sorry, but this "Be an easy target" rule is self-defeating. If you want to stop crime, or at least reduce it, then as a victim you have to fight back. If you just sit there and allow yourself to be victimized, you are not only responsible for being a pussy yourself, but for providing incentive for the criminal to go and victimize yourself, thus making you at least partially responsible for the next crime the bastard commits.
Of course, if you want all of that hanging on your conscience because you're too chickenshit to stand up for yourself, why don't you take a walk down my street? You probably have some stuff that would come in pretty handy for me....
OH yeah. Of course cops will tell you to be a pussy. If everybody stopped putting up with criminals, cops would be out of the job. Advising people to just lay down and take it is called "job security", for both the cops and the muggers.
There is nothing wrong with corporate censorship.
I'm sorry, but there is something wrong with corporate censorship. Corporations are huge government-like organizations whose sole purpose for existence is making money. There are many corporations that are multi-national, and many of those (and many others) are very powerful. Letting corporations censor stuff is just as dangerous to freedom as letting the government do it.
The way I understand it, Disney laid out terms and said "we'll ship any movie that meets these terms" and Fahrenheight 911 met those terms, and Disney decided not to distribute it. Well, that's a broken promise, and considering the size and power of Disney, I think it's pretty fucking important that they keep their word. Whether the story as I hear it is correct or not is actually irrelevant, since my point is that honor, integrity, and so forth are even more important to society when manifested in large multi-national corporations than they are when manifested in individuals.
Never forget feudalism. Give corporations the power to censor and feudalism is where we're going, except I think under the circumstances it would be called fascism or something or other. Same thing. Some lord who owns everything working us really fucking hard, abusing us, and so forth.
Now, you could have said "There's nothing unconstitutional about corporate censorship" and you would have been at least accurate. But some forms of corporate censorship are illegal (they fall under the heading of Full Disclosure laws, like those nice stickers you get on the canned/jarred food you buy that tell you what's in the can/jar) because our government already knows that corporate censorship is dangerous.
Although Civ is a very cool game and there are lots of planning and manegement skills one could learn from it, I wouln't reccomend it as a teaching tool, due to it's lack of connection to actual events in history. I don't think that games where students have the opportunity to write/re-write history are a good idea. I can easily imagine some high school age kids, raised on Civ saying "didn't the Babalonians build the Pyramids?"
I think you're failing to give students enough credit (although you're undoubtedly giving teachers too much).
Flip it around. Start your history class by playing Civ for the first month of the class. The whole class, together, (better make it FreeCiv with networking and crap) competitively against one another.
*Now* start teaching regular history. I'll bet you cover the curriculum in half the time, just by investing that month playing Civ, and you'll increase your students' average grades and seriously inflate (properly) their standardized test scores, because they will have *understanding* of how history happened.
Um, erm, let's see. As far as I can tell, Wolfenstein was based on the much older Castle Wolfenstein, which was originally produced by the nice German folks at Muse.
Um, yeah, cultural bias and all. Right. But which culture, exactly, is the bias coming from?
Can I ask who was the one that perpetuated all of those hardware misconceptions?
I take it you've never shopped for a computer desk?
There's a self-defeating statment if I've ever seen one. Regardless, a quick search reveals that many mechanic services do indeed bill for diagnostics. Those who don't either pay their technicians less or charge you a higher hourly rate. The general reason why diagnositc fees are either all or nothing is because it is common to spend differing amounts of time diagnosing the same symptoms. Even a doctor will tell you that (who do, in fact, charge for s/office visits/diagnostic fees/).
Well, a former professional mechanic (me) says different. 99% of problems people have with cars can be diagnosed in 5 minutes or less, usually less. Building a relationship with a customer is worth spending those 5 minutes working for *free* to diagnose their car. I can't even think of how many stupid GM AC pressure sensors I sold just because they always looked the same on the gauges, and it literally took 2 seconds to hook up the gauges.
IN some specific areas, like exhaust and brakes, the free-looky is standard practice.
Besides the dealer (you know, the greediest little fuck on the block), most mechanics will only charge for diagnostics when they can't tell within 3-5 minutes what's wrong. That's the rule of thumb generally applied, actually. In the meantime, though, *every* mechanic shop posts something somewhere that says "We charge *this whole ton of money* for diagnostics", knowing that 99% of their diagnostics will be done for free.
Think about it. You're a customer, and you see a sign that says "Pay us $60 to tell us why your car is fucked up" and the mechanic just walks out and does it without billing you. Now how do you feel? How much does it increase the likelihood that you'll buy from these people who are obviously dedicated to serving the customer rather than bleeding him?
I think the OP was trying to avoid getting into a fight with ibm.
I just paid 2.01 for 85 octane
Would have been cheaper if you'd've sprung for the higher octane stuff. Most new(er) cars (as in, post 1975) are rated at 86 as the minimum. 85 just plain sucks. I used to drive a 91 Mazda 626 that got about 24 MPG on the highway. I put 84 octane in it in some po-dunk hick town in west Texas and only got 15 MPG on the tank. I was *pissed*.
Yep, you spent too much on your gas because you bought the wrong kind. ;)
Federal PMITA prison
Obligatory prison rape bleeding-heart waa waa cry for the criminals post getting modded to offtopic oblivion.
I think the generally accepted term is "Space opera", which it always has been. ;)